What Are Backlinks and Why Does Your Website Need Them?

Are you aware of the importance of backlinks when determining the ranking of your website in the search engines? Did you know that backlinks are considered the currency of the internet, and without it, your website is worthless?

Good backlinks are used as a way to gain credibility in the search engines. They increase the chance that your website is gonna get found by visitors and potential customers. This means that if you don’t have good backlinks, you could be leaving a lot of customers behind, and losing money in the process.

This article will get you up to speed on how to implement backlinks and increase your traffic and profits in a short amount of time. Let’s get into it.

Why Do You Need Backlinks?

Let’s start at the beginning and explain what backlinks are, and exactly why your website needs good backlinks.

The world wide web was named as such for a reason. The whole web with its millions of pages are all interconnected by a series of links. Links add context and tell the spiders that crawl the internet that there are more pages to be found through the backlinks that exist there.

If no one links back to your website, how do you expect it to be found? It won’t be!

Backlinks are important, but not all backlinks are created equal. If your backlinks come from websites that have an ill reputation with the search engines, your website will automatically be associated with these bad websites. This can be very harmful to your business.

However, having backlinks from websites that have authority, relevance and trust will cause the search engines to associate you with these sites instead, giving you a better ranking.

Getting Referred Traffic

Referral traffic is used to describe visitors to your site that come from direct links on other websites and not from search engines. Referrals increase the page rank of your website, which also helps to boosts it in the Google rankings, giving you more traffic down the line. Referral traffic is important because it provides a steady source of traffic outside of search engines. This is critical because relying 100% on all your traffic to come from Google is like putting all your eggs in one basket.

What happens the day Google changes their algorithm, and your website is no longer ranked among the top sites? If all your traffic comes from Google, your business would suffer a massive blow, as you could lose all your traffic overnight.

However, if you have a steady flow of referred traffic, you will be okay. You will still get traffic from your referrals until you manage to build up your ranking in the search engines again.

This is why ensuring that you have backlinks from credible sites that give you a steady flow of traffic, is a very important strategy to pursue.

How to Start Getting Backlinks

Now that you have a better understanding of what backlinks are and why they are so important for your search engine ranking, let’s have a look at how you can start getting quality backlinks to your site.

Write valuable content

Write about topics that are specific to your niche of business. This is the topic that will be the easiest for you to write about because you already have a ton of knowledge about it.

Alternatively, you can hire a writer to produce content for your website and blog. This is a relatively small price to pay for establishing yourself as an authority in your niche.

The key factor here is to write content that provides value to your potential customer. If the article answered a question they had, there is a good chance that they will want to share it with their network.

If they do so, it will help you build up your backlink profile, and give you more visibility. This leads us to our next important point.

Use Social Media Platforms

Keeping a social media profile for your business is a great way to share new content, campaigns or offers, as well as to connect with your customers.

If you share your content and give your followers a chance to share it as well, this will give you lots of exposure and help you build up your backlink profile.

You don’t have to use every social media platform known to man. Think about where your prospects hang out.

Generally, Facebook is great for connecting with people, whereas Pinterest and Instagram are great for visual campaigns. If you are marketing yourself to young people, consider using Twitter, and if your customers are other business owners, consider using LinkedIn instead.

Write Guest Articles

Quite possibly the single greatest way of getting high-quality backlinks to your site is writing guest articles. What this means is that you write an article on the blog of another company or website.

In that article, you write about something that is relevant to their audience, but also helps to qualify people that could be interested in your blog or business, and send them to your site.

Don’t forget to include a few scattered links throughout the article that lead back to your site or previous blog posts. These are the links that people will use to navigate to your site, and this is what will make Google see you as a credible website.

List Your Website in a Reputable Directory

Another step you can take is to list your website in a reputable and niche-specific website directory. A directory is essentially a list of business websites where people come when they want to search for a specific service provider.

Having your business listed on such a site will help you attract more customers. In addition, these directories will also be crawled by the search engine spiders, helping you rank higher.

Repair Broken Links on Your Website

This is a simple, but a very important step to take. If your website contains any broken links, your visitors will take that as a sign that your website is outdated.

Furthermore, search engines will punish your website for having broken links, decreasing your overall ranking. Fortunately, there is a simple way to identify and correct any dead links and 404 error pages.

In Conclusion

Now that you know what backlinks are and why they are so important for growing your business, you should start thinking about what strategy you want to pursue for your own business website.

If you want to make things simple, have a look at the SEO Booster Plugin, and discover how it can help you grow your search engine ranking today.